[Techpowerup]AMD Preparing to Drop 32-bit Support for Radeon Drivers?

[railven]

No need to jump those hoops. Win10 activates with a win7 key, and there is no difference between a 32 and 64 bit win7 key.

Just do a clean win10 install.

Is that so? Thanks for the tip. Should save me 30mins or so.

 

[thesmokingman]

^^I believe you need to get the newer iso for the current build.

 

[Flapdrol1337]

^^I believe you need to get the newer iso for the current build.

Really? I'd expect that stuff to be serverside.

Anyway, I activated with a win7 key in January. Been that way for a while.

 

[railven]

I can't remember the date I made my Win10 Pro ISO USB key, but I'll have to make a new one for Win10 "Home" since they only have Win 7 Home.

 

[ViRGE]

I'm not sure why this is news. AMD hasn't been certifying their 32-bit drivers for their new high-end hardware since the 300 series launched last year. Nothing has changed since June.

Meanwhile they continue to produce 32-bit drivers for all other products, including the recent release of 16.3.2. There's no reason to think that 32-bit drivers are going away entirely any time soon, but they have stopped adding/certifying new cards for them.

Example: August driver download page: https://web.archive.org/web/20150801145416/http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

 

[cytg111]

In your graphics driver? If you are running anything which could possibly launch an exploit through the graphics driver, you're already screwed.

http://www.securityweek.com/researcher-unwraps-dangerous-nvidia-driver-exploit-christmas-day

Google has more .

 

[VirtualLarry]

I can't even remember the last time I've used a 32b OS. Pre Win7 I'm thinking.

Yay XP!

But seriously, I had 64-bit capable systems back then (Core2, AMD Athlon64 and sucessors), just no 64-bit OS, until I got Windows 7. Been 64-bit ever since. Well, except for the annoying situation of some of these Atom-based tablets and laptop and compute sticks, that shipped with a 64-bit CPU, but a 32-bit UEFI / firmware, which limits them to 32-bit versions of Windows. (Gee, thanks Intel!)

 

[VirtualLarry]

TIL: R7 is "high end GPUs."

Wonder to see how this will affect my mom and nephews PCs. Since they still use Windows 7 32bit because the license they bought only came with it.

Uhh, you do know that 64-bit and 32-bit Windows 7 license keys are inter-changeable, right? All you need is install media of the proper bit-ness.

 

[TheRyuu]

In your graphics driver? If you are running anything which could possibly launch an exploit through the graphics driver, you're already screwed.

Are you currently using a web browser with hardware acceleration? Well congratulations you're running software which can potentially launch an exploit with the help of your graphics drivers (e.g. it would be used in a way to help escape the sandboxing of modern browsers).

Now with all that being said I'm not sure how common such attacks are likely to be. It's just that we've spent a long time locking down the user mode side of things that it's only logical to move to the kernel when looking for ways to escape the restrictive sandboxes in today's browsers (well most browsers *cough* Firefox *cough*).

 

[railven]

Uhh, you do know that 64-bit and 32-bit Windows 7 license keys are inter-changeable, right? All you need is install media of the proper bit-ness.

And that just saved me even more time

<the more you know star.gif>